[In the following review, Gorra evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India, noting that the book's weak structure “makes it neither a unified whole nor a collection of fully individual essays.”]

At a dinner party this spring I sat between two novelists from South Asia and listened to them talk about contemporary Indian politics. Was there any chance that the former prime minister, Narasimha Rao, might go to jail on corruption charges? How about the relation between the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party and the thugs of Bombay's Shiv Sena? Did the Congress Party really think it could bring down the government? The conversation was racily full of India's lifeblood of gossip, and I found to my surprise that I could follow it all. But then I had just finished reading Gita Mehta's Snakes and Ladders.

Published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of India's independence from Britain, Snakes and Ladders takes its title from a board game in which a roll of the dice determines “how many squares a player may move.” Landing at the foot of a ladder lets you climb it. “sometimes moving thirty squares in a single throw.” But landing on a snake means you have to slide back down “while your gleeful opponents [streak] past.” For Mehta the game provides an apt metaphor for postcolonial India, a country that sometimes seems to have “vaulted over the painful stages experienced by other countries, lifted by ladders we had no right to expect.” But at other moments, she adds, “we have been swallowed by the snakes of past nightmares, finding ourselves … back at square one.”

Mehta's “glimpses of modern India” stand as an attempt to “explain” the country to herself, an explanation that provides a user friendly guide to the many snakes who have stuck their fangs into contemporary Indian politics. She begins with an account of her parents involvement in the Independence movement that echoes Wordsworth—“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.” But Mehta then shows how the promised land of independence has been weakened by the dominance of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Her analysis seems fair enough; nevertheless it will be familiar to anyone who's read much about the country. What's fresh about it is the deftness with which she weaves personal anecdote into political chronicle. So she describes attending a rally against Indira Gandhi's experiment in totalitarian rule, the “Emergency” of 1975-77, a rally held in Delhi's enormous Friday Mosque. The government cut off the electricity, and the resulting “darkness … added a somberness to the occasion … allowing us to see the great mosque as it must have been seen by” the Moghul emperors who built it, “its massive lines … undiminished by … neon.” And as for Mrs. Gandhi's claim that Indira was India and India Indira—well, I admire the drop-dead insouciance with which Mehta describes being “bored to tears” by such “overbearing leaders.”

India's ladders are more tentatively described. On one level they have to do with such things as the existence of a free press, and the continued functioning, despite massive corruption, of Indian democracy; with the fact as well that the country has become self-sufficient in food. But Mehta is also fascinated by the resilience of her fellow citizens, the ingenuity with which they manage to scrape up a living in the most difficult circumstances; in one of the book's most memorable chapters, she functions as a subcontinental Studs Terkel, interviewing ragpickers at work in Delhi's garbage dumps. And Mehta remains exhilarated by the astonishing scale of India, which beggars that of Western Europe—a country whose “lack of homogeneity” means that “most Indians view most other Indians as foreigners.” To Mehta that heterogeneity is a strength, a point that she makes by contrasting India with Japan. For when Japan, that once-closed nation, let in the West, the kimono virtually vanished. India, she writes, has never tried to banish the foreign; and the sari remains.

Mehta's strongest chapters are not, however, the ones in which she makes such large cultural claims. Instead she's at her best when her subjects seem at their most modest and most personal. I enjoyed the wicked eye with which she describes the visit to India of an American corporate group called the “Young Presidents' Organization,” a description that recalls her 1980 Karma Cola, a sharply satiric account of the marketing of Indian spirituality in the West. She offers an enchanting essay on her own childhood reading, on “lending libraries … that fit into garishly painted tin trunks, small enough to be strapped onto the backs of bicycles.” And I think I'll always remember a piece about a filmmaker who raised the money for his movies literally at the grassroots level. He hired a van and a projector, and travelled from village to village, showing classics in the rice fields; Battleship Potemkin was the villagers' great favorite.

Parts of Snakes and Ladders betray their origins as magazine articles, pieces not only for Britain's Sunday Times but for Vogue and House and Garden as well. The book seems to have a disjointed structure, its chapters loosely stitched together in a way that makes it neither a unified whole nor a collection of fully individual essays. But Gita Mehta's voice is marked by warmth and charm, and this volume serves as a fine reminder as to why India remains, in the words that she lovingly quotes from Mark Twain, “the one land all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.”